non-romance romance, #4: Outline (Rachel Cusk)
points of view and all the detail filled in
This is the fourth issue in an ongoing series where I write about things that are not romance novels that I think romance novel readers might enjoy, with the genre as a lens. In the last issue, I wrote about Bleak House by Charles Dickens, All the Beauty and The Bloodshed (dir. Laura Poitras), and court systems in both works.
This week’s episode of Reformed Rakes is about A Bride for a Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath. Bride is a single perspective historical romance. We talk about this convention in the episode, out tomorrow, with added context of how the single perspective convention relates to Gothic elements of the book, out tomorrow.
I love the convention of dual perspective in historical romance: measuring how who gets to share what information and when, the built in dramatic tension of a reader having access to two perspectives and characters working toward a shared language. I also love when authors do something slightly different or pay particular attention to how dual POV is serving the narrative.
Rachel Cusk’s Outline is the first of a trilogy of novels that centers on Faye, an author and the books’ first person narrator, and conversations she has. Faye is structurally one half of the conversations, but, as noted in almost every review of these books, she is more prone to ask questions than respond to them, and even to elide or collapse her answers in reporting the conversations to the reader, prompting long monologues from her various conversational teammates.
Speech by the non-Faye characters are reported both with Faye-as-first person recounting (“He had been trying to remember, he said, how long it was since our last encounter -- did I know?”) and in non-Faye-as-first person quotations (“‘My husband is a diplomat,’ she said, ‘so we have travelled a lot, evidently, for his work.’”) But the gap in diction between Faye’s recounting and direct quotations is limited and in my experience both times I have read the book, there were moments of slippage in identifying the voicer of the information.
Faye, whose name we only learn in the ninth out of ten chapters, is traveling from her home in London to teach a creative course in Greece to Greek students, along with other writers. The ten chapters mark ten (and some halves) conversations between Faye and new acquaintances, colleagues, or her students. The character who she is in conversation with the most is a Greek man she meets on the plane from London in the first chapter, with a third of the book dedicated to their meeting and subsequent encounters.
He is not the first person she speaks in the novel--she has lunch with “a billionaire [she]’d been promised had liberal credentials” to discuss a literary magazine he was thinking about starting. Their lunch is immediately before Faye gets on the plane; she takes a cab (paid for by the billionaire) to the airport. The billionaire takes up two paragraphs and never returns to Faye’s consciousness during her time in Greece.
But the framing of the conversation with the billionaire sets the conceit for the next nine and a half chapters. In the first of two mentions of the title word, Faye tells the reader that “The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of his life story,” as a sort of explanation of why their lunch never actually gets the topic at hand before Faye has to leave for the airport
Then Faye reports what the billionaire told about himself and in the first reactive glimpse from Faye to these conversations, she recalls “I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told.”
The taking in of information and understanding and misunderstanding its holistic meaning, especially as an observer and listener, rather than experiencer, marks these moments of mirroring from Faye, as reader only learns about her through her the stories told by other people and her reported reactions to them.
The last chapter includes the other mention of the title word. A new resident in the rented out apartment where Faye is staying--the next teacher in the writing class series, arrives while Faye is still there. Alice, the new teacher, is the last person Faye has an in-person conversation with in the book, but Alice’s monologue focuses on the man that she met on the plane from Manchester to Athens. Alice is a playwright who has been struggling to produce work in the time since she was the victim of a mugging, resulting in a nihilism about experience that manifests in her brain’s attempt and success in a process she calls “summing up:” “Why go to the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up?”
Alice finds herself doing this with works she reads too, and then life experiences as well. But in the conversation with the man on the plane, Alice finds herself increasingly interested in her neighbor’s life, asking more and more questions, which he answers readily.
“...and the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her…This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. ”
This self-definition, even in negative space, is a revelation to Alice, post her mugging. But then her neighbor reveals something about himself, something he struggles with, and he is unsure of the origin of the difficulty. Alice offers a potential explanation, gleaning from her newly acquired knowledge of his life, a reason that has the narrative weight and neatness of a constructed play. Her neighbor considers her proffered explanation and shoots it down, offering instead a much less romantic one. Alice feels “chastised” and the conversation stops, even with an half hour left in the flight.
It can be easy to forget while reading this chapter that Alice is the secondary intermediary to this man on the plane, with our narrator now one more step removed from primary storytelling when the man discusses his struggle. Faye is now in the position the reader has been for the last ten chapters: hearing someone frame someone else’s story.
In an interview that was published in The New Yorker, Cusk responded to the question “why is Faye so passive?” with “So she has no identity, so what can her participation be? Because conversation is—it’s like a peacock showing their feathers to you. It’s a showing of identity to each other, and a search for conformity, a search for agreement. A search for agreement is really all that culture actually is, and it’s an amazingly good system. It’s what enables things to be recognized if enough time can pass.”
Everything in romance is relative to another person--it is why dual perspective makes so much sense in the telling of the story of a relationship, every aspect of a main character can be asked of and answered by the other. What they know, how they relate to the world, what their personal values are, main characters are defined by the edges of each other, by virtue of the genre mandate. The resolution is the agreement.
Dual perspective is such a convention that the how and why of the structure of these books can feel like a given, when of course nothing is inherent in a written novel. For example, I can count on one hand the number of romances I have read where the first sex scene between a couple is told completely from the perspective of the more experienced partner. It is a common set up of outward seduction from the perspective of the more experienced partner and then a flip in perspective focused on the interior mind (and consent) by the less experienced partner.
I’m still very attached to dual perspective, but since I read Outline for the first time last July, I have attempted to not accept its form as a given. It feels fitting that I read Outline in the midst of reading a bunch of Anne Mallory books. Mallory is one of the authors who I think pushes dual perspective to a formal extreme, even as she never fully abandons it, like Coldbreath does in A Bride for a Prizefighter.
Something Mallory does, which I first noticed while reading One Night is Never Enough, is stretch how much thought she put inside a conversation. It makes for occasionally hard to follow scenes. One character will speak to the other and then there will be long passages (pages sometimes) of inner thought from the spoken to character, and then a character will respond. It feels like thought process based writing, but I frequently have to go back paragraphs or pages to remember exactly what was said the first time. Mallory has written books with really inequitable percentages of POV between characters. But in One Night is Never Enough, she is pushing how deeply we can enter someone’s mind, to the exclusion of the other, while remaining in conversation.
I said in my original notes on Outline that I could imagine a version of myself frustrated with the slipping and lack of tether I felt between who was telling and who was listening between Faye and her collaborators. But I also wrote “well, I should be paying closer attention and what is the sin in an author insisting I pay attention?”